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Tuesday, March 31, 2015

While in Shanghai on a business trip recently, in a restaurant eating some terrifyingly spicy fish hot-pot with a couple of my Aidyia colleagues, I noticed the radio was playing a cover version of a song from the original Muppet Movie, “The Rainbow Connection”….

As often happens, this got me thinking….

This is not remotely an original observation, but it’s one of these cliches that has struck me over and over again during my life: There’s a certain beauty to the process of seeking, which often exceeds the satisfaction of finding what one is looking for. This is related to why so many people enjoy the process of entrepreneurship — of starting new things and chasing success. The feeling of increasing success is exciting, the ups and downs as one moves toward the goal and then toward and then away etc. in complex patterns are exciting…. Actually achieving the goal may give an oomph of satisfaction but then the oomph goes away and one craves the joy of the process of seeking again. Of course there are always new things to seek though — one can seek to grow one’s company bigger and bigger, etc. Many people enjoy seducing new men or women more than actually having an ongoing relationship with one whom they’ve captured, but I’ve never quite felt that way; I guess seeking a really good ongoing relationship is enough of a challenging quest for me, given my peculiar and in some ways difficult personality…

This point struck me hard as a kid when I was watching the Muppet Movie and saw Kermit the Frog singing the “The Rainbow Connection”

Why are there so many songs about rainbowsAnd what's on the other sideRainbows are visionsBut only illusionsAnd rainbows have nothing to hide

So we've been toldAnd some choose to believe itI know they're wrong, wait and seeSome day we'll find itThe rainbow connectionThe lovers, the dreamers, and me

Who said that every wishWould be heard and answeredWhen wished on the morning starSomebody thought of thatAnd someone believed itAnd look what it's done so far

What's so amazingThat keeps us stargazingAnd what do we think we might seeSome day we'll find itThe rainbow connectionThe lovers, the dreamers, and me

All of us under its spell, we know that it's probably magic

Have you been half asleep?And have you heard voices?I've heard them calling my name;Is this the sweet soundThat called the young sailors?The voice might be one and the same

I've heard it too many times to ignore itIt's something that I'm supposed to beSome day we'll find itThe rainbow connectionThe lovers, the dreamers, and me

Kermit’s plaintive froggy voice moved my emotions and I have to say it still does, way more than the typical ballad sung by a human pop star… What occurred to me as a child as I watched him sing (maybe not the first time I saw the movie — we had it on video-tape when I was a kid and I heard the song more than once!), was that he had found his Rainbow Connection right there, inside the song — He was seeking something else, something beyond himself and his life, but actually inside the beauty of the song, and the feeling of singing the song, and the connection between him and the singer — and the songwriters and puppeteers behind the Kermit persona — and the various listeners of the song such as myself, and the people singing and humming the song around the world at various times and places … this whole melange of feeling and creation and expression and interaction obviously WAS the “Rainbow Connection” — a connection between different minds and voices, sounds waving through the air and colored pictures flashing on screens decoded from electromagnetic waves cast through the air via antennas … a diversity of colors beyond the humanly perceived rainbow and including all sorts of other frequencies …. When I listened to the song I was basking in the reality of the Rainbow Connection and so was the imaginary and real Kermit. Of course as a child I didn’t articulate it exactly this way but less-crystallized versions of these thoughts verged through my mind (as probably has happened with many other listeners to this same song, in another aspect of the Good Old Rainbow Connection). And I could only suspect that somewhere in the back of his good-natured though not that bright little froggy mind, Kermit realized that the beauty was really in the process of seeking and not in the goal — that the beauty and connection and joy he was after, were already there in the the song he was singing about the quest for these things, and in the life and love he expressed that constituted and animated this quest itself….

So, well, all hail Kermit !!! ... what else?

Similar ideas have occurred to me recently in an utterly different context…

A different twist on the aesthetic primacy of process over goal is provided by the Maximum Entropy Production Principle, which hypothesizes that, in many circumstances, complex systems evolve along paths of *maximum entropy production*. The fine print is complex, but there's a lot of evidence mathematical, conceptual and physical in favor of this idea, e.g.:

This is rather fascinating — it suggests we can think about the wonderful complexity of life, nature, humanity and so forth as, in some measure, resulting from a rush to achieve the goal of the Second Law of Thermodynamics — heat death — as rapidly as possible!! Of course this isn’t really the total story of complexity and life and all that, but it seems to be an important ingredient — and it’s certainly a poignant one. The goal in this case is a humanly repellent and disturbing one: the loss of complex form and the advent of stultifyingly uniform random movement in the universe. The path followed in working toward this goal is a deep, rich, tremendously beautiful one.

Whether you’re seeking the Rainbow Connection or Ultimate Heat Death, it seems that the process of optimization, in many cases, has a great deal of power to create beauty and structure and feeling. The process of seeking a goal in the face of limitations and constraints forces a tradeoff between the degree of goal fulfillment and the constraints — and it’s this dance that leads to so much structure and beauty.

In the case of a song like the Rainbow Connection, the constraints are about time (people get bored if a song is too long) and human comprehension (it’s hard to express a universal human feeling in a way that humans can universally appreciate, given the diversity of our mind-sets and cultures) and the physics of sound waves and the limitations of the human ear and so on. In the case of Jimi Hendrix, whose music I prefer to even that of Kermit, it was about Hendrix’s musical creativity and the sounds he heard in his head interacting with the constraints of what could be done with the electric guitar and the amplification and production equipment at the time.

In the case of thermodynamics, the core constraints are the “laws” of mechanics and temporal continuity. The end goal is Ultimate Heat Death, perhaps, but a physical system can only change so much at each point in time. The physical system is trying to maximize entropy production, yeah, but it can only do so in a manner consistent with the laws of physics, which — among many other constraints — only allow a certain pace of change over time. Figuring out how to maximize entropy production in the context of obeying the laws of physics and what they say about the relation between matter and spacetime — this is the interplay that helps yield the wonderful complexity we see all around us.

If the constraints were too relaxed, the goal might get approached too quickly and surely, and there would be no beauty on the path along the way. If the goal and the constrants were both weak, things might just drift around quasi-randomly in less than interesting ways. If the constraints were too strong there might just be no interesting ways for the overall objective function to get pursued (be it heat death or writing a great song or whatever). Constraints that are strong but not too strong, imposed on a suitable objective function, are what yield wonderful complexity. Lots of analogies arise here, from raising kids to the evolution of species.

To view it in terms of optimization theory: Constraints take a simple objective function and turn it into a complex objective function with multiple extrema and subtle dependencies all across the fitness landscape. These subtleties in the objective function lead to subtle, intricate partial solutions — and when there is a continuity constraint, so that newly posed solutions must constitute slight variations on previously posed solutions, the only way to dramatically maximize the core objective function is to pass through a variety of these partial solutions.

The ultimate bliss and glorious spectral togetherness Kermit was seeking — or that my childhood self thought he was seeking — or whatever — is an amazing, thrilling vision for sure. But the process of gradually moving toward this ultimate cosmic vision, in a manner consistent with the constraints of human and froggy life, and the continuity constraint in moving through possible solutions, is what yields such subtle, interesting and moving forms as we see, hear and are in this world right now…

…

OK OK, that’s all pretty fast and loose, I know. Hey, I’m just musing while listening to a song, not proving a bloody theorem. My petty human mind, not yet achieved ultimate superintelligence, has got to churn through stuff like this day by day to gradually muck toward a fuller understanding of the world. It’s a process ;-) ….

Sunday, March 08, 2015

How I Came to Accept
the Paranormal

While I’m generally an extremely stubborn person, my opinion has radically changed on some topics over the
years. I don't view this as a bad thing. I don't aspire to be one of those people whose ideas are set in stone, impervious to growth or adaptation.

Some of my changes of opinion have been purely "changes of heart" -- e.g. in my early 20s I transitioned from a teenage solipsism to a more compassion-oriented attitude, due more to internal growth than any external data or stimuli.

Other times, the cause of my change of opinion has been encountering some body of evidence that I simply hadn’t
been aware of earlier.

The change of mind I'm going to write about here has been of the latter kind -- data-driven.

What I’m going to write about here is a certain class of
paranormal phenomena that seem related to religious notions of “survival after
death.”In my teens and 20s I was
pretty confident these phenomena were obviously nothing more than wishful
thinking.People didn't want to admit
they were doomed to die one day, so they made up all sorts of fanciful stories
about heavens and hells after death, and reincarnation, and ghosts and
what-not.

I didn’t want to die either,
but I was interested in achieving physical immortality via fixing the problems
that make the human body age, orby
uploading mymind into a robot or
computer or whatever – by methods that made good solid rational sense according
to science, even if they seemed outlandish according to most peoples’ everyday
world-views.

(I did, in my youth, acquire from somewhere some sort of
intuitive spiritual sense that my mind would continue to exist after my death, fused with
the rest of the universe somehow.But I
didn’t imagine I’d continue to have any individuality or will after my body
died – I intuitively, non-rationally felt I’d continue to exist in some sort of
inert form, always on the verge of having a thought or taking an action but never
quite doing so….)

My current view of these "survival-ish" paranormal phenomena is quite different.I definitely haven’t had any sort of
religious conversion, and I don’t believe any of the traditional stories about
an afterlife are anywhere near accurate.But I now am fairly confident there is SOMETHING mysterious and paranormal going on, related to reincarnation, channeling and related phenomena.

My new perspective doesn’t fit that well into our standard contemporary verbiage, but a reasonable summary might be:

Individual human minds have an aspect that is
"nonlocal", in the sense of not being restricted to exist within the flow of our time-axis, in the same sense
that our bodies are generally restricted.

Due to this non-localized aspect, it’s possible
for human minds that are evidently grounded in bodies in a certain spacetime region, to
manifest themselves in various ways outside this spacetime region – thus
sometimes generating phenomena we now think of as “paranormal”

This non-localized aspect of human minds
probably results from the same fundamental aspects of the universe that enable
psi phenomena like ESP, precognition, and psychokinesis

The path from understanding which core aspects
of physics enable these phenomena, to understanding why we see the
precise paranormal phenomena we do, may be a long one – just as the path from
currently known physics to currently recognized biology and psychology is a
long one

How did I come to this new view?

The first step was to accept, based on an extensive review
of the available evidence, that psi phenomena are almost surely real.My perspective on this is summarized in the
introductory and concluding chapters of Evidence for Psi, a book I co-edited
with Damien Broderick last year.See
also the links on this page.I don’t
want to take space and time here summarizing the evidence for psi phenomena,
which includes lots of carefully-analyzed laboratory data, alongside loads of
striking, well-substantiated anecdotal evidence.It was the laboratory data that first
convinced me psi was very likely real.After getting largely convinced by the laboratory data, I started
reading through the literature on anecdotal psi phenomena, and it started to
seem less and less feasible that it was all just fabricated.

I recall reading (a few years ago) the excellent book
Varieties of Anomalous Experience, with its run-down of various case studies of
apparent reincarnation, and then digging into that literature a bit further
afterwards.I became almost-convinced
there was SOMETHING paranormal going on there, though not terribly convinced
that this something was really “reincarnation” as typically conceived.

Now I’ve just read the equally excellent book Immortal Remains by the philosopher Stephen Braude.In the careful, rationalist manner of the analytical philosopher, he
summarizes and dissects the evidence for various paranormal phenomena that
others have taken as indicative of an afterlife for humans – reincarnation,
mediumistic channeling, possession, out-of-body experiences, and so forth.(But the book is a lot more fun to read than
most academic philosophy works, with lots of entertaining tidbits alongside the
meticulous deductions and comparisons – it’s highly recommended to anyone with a
bit of patience who wants to better understand this confusing universe we live
in!).

Survival versus
SuperPsi versus ??

One of Braude’s themes in the book is the comparison of what
he (following generally accepted terminology in this area) calls “survival” based versus “SuperPsi” based explanations of these
phenomena. SuperPsi in this context means any combination of recognized psi
phenomena like ESP, precognition, psychokinesis and so forth – even very
powerful combinations of very powerful instances of these phenomena.

One thing that Braude points out in the book is that, for
nearly all the phenomena he considers, there seems to be a thinkable
SuperPsi-based explanation, as well as a thinkable survival-based
explanation.This is not surprising
since neither the SuperPsi hypothesis nor the survival hypothesis can be very
clearly formulated at this stage of our knowledge.So, he considers the choice between the two
classes of hypothesis to come down mainly to considerations of simplicity.In his view, the SuperPsi explanations often
tend to get way too complex and convoluted, leading him to the conclusion that
there is most probably some survival-esque phenomenon going on along with
probably lots of psi phenomena....(For
a discussion of why I agree with Braude that simplicity is key to a good
scientific explanation, see this essay, which was reprinted with slight changes
as part of my book The Hidden Pattern.)

The contrast of survival vs. SuperPsi makes a compelling
theme for a book, but I suspect it may not be the best way to think about the
issues.

As far as my attitudes have drifted, I still strongly doubt
that “survival” in any traditional sense is the real situation.I really doubt that, after people have died,
they keep on living in some “other world” – whether a heaven or hell or just
another planet or whatever.I also
really doubt that, after someone dies, their soul or essence enters another
person so that this other person is “a new version of them” (the traditional
reincarnation story in its most common form).One thing Braude’s careful review makes clear is how scantily the
evidence supports these traditional conclusions.

The evidence DOES support the conclusion that the paranormal
phenomena Braude considers actually happen in the world, and don’t have
explanations in terms of science as we now know it.But the evidence does NOT especially strongly
support any of the classical religious analyses of these paranormal phenomena.My own view is that these religious attempts
at explanation have largely served to cloud the matter.Personally, the main reason I previously
rejected these sorts of phenomena entirely, was my reaction to the various conceptual
inconsistencies and obvious appeals to human emotion that I saw in these
traditional religious explanations.

What we see in the data Braude considers is that:

After a human being dies, it is sometimes
possible for “self and other mind patterns” associated with that human being’s
mind to manifest themselves in the world at a later time.

While a human being is alive, it is sometimes
possible for“self and other mind
patterns” associated with that human being’s mind to manifest themselves in the
world at some distant physical location, without any good conventional explanation
for how this could happen

Sometimes these “self and other mind patterns”
manifest themselves in a manner that is mixed up with other things, e.g. with
someone else’s mind

Sometimes these “self and other mind patterns”
provide evidence of their association with the mind of a spatially or
temporally distant human, which is very difficult to “explain away” in terms of
known science

Exactly what specific forms the above phenomena take is a
long story, which Braude tells in his book, which I don’t feel like taking time
to summarize here right now.Read the
book!

Anyway, it should be pretty clear that the above does not
imply “survival / afterlife” in any traditional sense.Yet Braude makes a good case that
hypothesizing these phenomena to be caused by some combination of ESP,
psychokinesis, precognition and so forth becomes inordinately complicated.

From Carbon to
Ecosystems

One thing that strikes me is what a long distance exists
between potential “physics of psi” explanations like my Surprising Multiverse
Theory, and the complex, messy particulars of phenomena like mediumistic
channeling.Channeling, for instance, apparently
involves subtle intersections between individual and social psychology and
culture, and appears to mix up instances of ESP and psychokinesis with other
“nonlocal mind” phenomena that are more distinct from traditional psi.

An analogy that springs to mind, however, is the relation
between the carbon atom and the complexities of the Earth’s ecosystem.The carbon atom enables the development of
life, and this can be seen, in a general sense, via looking at the atom at the
micro level, and the nature of the bonds it permits.On the other hand, predicting the specifics
of macroscopic life based on the microscopic properties of the carbon atom is
something we still can’t come close to doing.We can’t, yet, even solve the protein folding problem (a very particular
subcase of this more general problem).

Similarly, it’s “easy” to see that hypotheses like the
Surprising Multiverse Theory have some potential to explain how the universe
could contain phenomena like mediumistic channeling, apparent reincarnation,
and so forth.But getting from
something like a low-level information-theoretic tweak to quantum physics, up
to specific predictions about paranormal phenomena among human beings, is bound
to involve a lot of complexity, just like any explanation bridging multiple
hierarchical levels of reality.

Toward a Paranormal-Friendly
(Patternist) Philosophy of the Cosmos

I don’t have anywhere near a scientific explanation of these
paranormal phenomena I’m talking about, at present.I would like to find one, perhaps by building
up from Surprising Multiverse Theory or something similar, perhaps by some
other means.Of course, I don’t think it
makes sense to reject evidence simply because we don’t have a good theory for
it yet.

I do have a philosophical perspective on these phenomena,
which helps me think about them in what I hope is a coherent way.My basic philosophy of the universe is
summarized in The Hidden Pattern (free pdf) and A Cosmist Manifesto (free pdf).But thinking about paranormal phenomena leads
me to enrich and extend that basic philosophy in certain ways.

As I’ve said in my previous writings, my preferred way of thinking about
these things involves positing a Pattern Space, which exists outside our
spacetime continuum.The whole spacetime universe that defines our
everyday being, is just one particular pattern of organization, which in some
sense exists within a much larger space of patterns.When a pattern like a human mind emerges
within our spacetime continuum, it also exists in the broader pattern
space.

But what is meant by a pattern being “within our spacetime
continuum"?I haven’t thought about this
deeply before.Basically, I suggest,
what it means that this pattern is heavily interlinked with other patterns that
are “within our spacetime continuum”, and not so heavily interlinked with other
patterns that are not “within our spacetime continuum.”That is: the spacetime continuum may be
thought of as a special sort of cluster of interlinked patterns.

Since the spacetime continuum is just one powerful, but not
omnipotent, pattern of organization, it’s not so bizarre that sometimes a
pattern that is heavily interlinked with other patterns in the “spacetime
continuum pattern cluster”, could sometimes interlink with other patterns that
are outside this cluster.Extra-cluster
pattern interactions are then perceived, by patterns inside the cluster, as
“paranormal.”

This way of thinking ties in with philosopher Charles
Peirce’s “one law of mind” – which he formulated as “the tendency to take
habits.”Peirce observed that, in our
universe (but NOT in a hypothetical random universe), once a pattern has been
observed to exist, the probability of it being observed again is surprisingly
high.This is the basic idea underlying
the Surprising Multiverse Theory.This seems conceptually related to the statement that the patterns we observe mainly live
inside a cluster in pattern space.Inside a cluster, the odds of various entities being connected via a
strong pattern should be atypically high – that’s closely related to what makes
the cluster a cluster.

Mind Uploading via
Reincarnation Machines?

If indeed the paranormal phenomena Braude surveys are real,
and have some sort of scientific explanation that we just haven’t found yet,
then this has fascinating potential implications for mind uploading.It suggests that, when someone dies, their
mind is still in some sense somewhere – and can potentially be brought back by
appropriate dynamics in certain biophysical systems (e.g. the mind of a medium,
or a child born as an apparent reincarnation, etc.).

This raises the possibility that, by engineering the right
kind of physical system, it might be possible to specifically induce
“paranormal” phenomena that cause a dead person’s mind to manifest itself in
physical reality, long after that person’s death.

Of course, this is utterly wild speculation.But what makes it fun is that it’s also
fairly logical extrapolation from empirical observations.If the data about the paranormal is real,
but the data ultimately has some scientific explanation rather than a religious
one, then most likely the underlying phenomena can be tapped into and
manipulated via engineered systems, like all other scientifically understood
phenomena.

Of course, a scientific understanding of these phenomena
will likely include an understanding of their limitations. Maybe these limitations will prevent us from
building reincarnation machines.But
maybe they won’t.

If we buy the “morphic field” type idea, then what would
attract the reincarnation of a deceased person’s mind, would likely be a set of
mind-patterns very similar to that person’s mind.This would be in the spirit of the
well-demonstrated phenomenon of ESP among identical twins.

In this case, it would follow that one very good way to
engineer reincarnation might be to create an intelligent robot (perhaps with a
quantum-computer infrastructure?) with

Lots of the mind-patterns of the deceased person
one wishes to reincarnate

Lots of degrees of freedom capable of being
adjusted and adapted

This would be achieved, for instance, if one created a robot
intended as a simulacrum of a deceased person based on information they had
left behind – videos, emails and what-not.There are existing organizations focused specifically on accumulating
information about people so as to facilitate this kind of post-mortem simulation.

The strange and exciting hypothesis one is led to, is that
such a simulacrum might actually attract some of the mind-patterns of the
person simulated, seducing these patterns out of the overarching pattern space
– and thus animating the simulacrum with the “feel” of the person being
simulated, and perhaps specific memories and capabilities of that person,
beyond what was programmed into the simulacrum.

Oh Really?

I mean, AGI is almost trendy now, but when I started out
with it 30 years ago everyone thought I was nuts to be thinking about it or
trying to work on it.Peer pressure
doesn’t really work on me.

I don’t have any real interest in arguing these points with
people who haven’t taken the time to inform themselves about the relevant
data.If you want to discuss the points
I’ve raised here, do us all a favor and read at least

If you’ve absorbed all this data and are still highly
skeptical, then I’m quite willing to discuss and debate with you.On the other hand, if you feel like you
don’t want to take the time to read so many pages on this sort of topic, that’s
understandable – but yet, IMO, bymaking
this choice you are forfeiting your right to debate these points with people
who HAVE familiarized themselves with the data.

This is weird stuff, for sure.But don’t blame the messenger.It’s a weird world we live in.We understand very little of it, at present.If we want to increase our understanding as
rapidly as we can, the best strategy is to keep an open mind – to look at what
reality is showing us and really think about it, rather than shutting out
troublesome data because it doesn’t match our preconceptions, and rather than
accepting emotionally satisfying simplifications (be they scientific or
religious in nature).

Immortality and
Immortality

Does this line of thinking I’ve presented here reassure me
that my possible forthcoming physical death (I’m 48 years old now, certainly
old enough to be thinkig about such things!) may not be so bad after all?Hmmm – kind of, I guess.But I’m not going to cancel my Alcor membership,
nor stop devoting a portion of my time to longevity research.I want to keep this body going, or port my
mind to a different physical substrate in a direct way.

The apparent fact that my mind exists outside of spacetime,
and can potentially be brought back into spacetime – at least in some partial
way – after my death, doesn’t really diminish my urge to keep on continually
existing within THIS spacetime continuum, going forward from right now.Why would it?

The overarching pattern space is no doubt
wonderful, but ongoing existence in this limiting time-axis is pretty cool too –
and keeping on living here is very unlikely to stop my mind-patterns from
flourishing and romping trans-temporally in the cosmic pattern space, sooo....